Elmer Montgomery

How could anyone interested in sailing vessels resist climbing aboard this pair? Elmer Montgomery climbed aboard on June 22, 1940 and shot this scene from onboard the Hesper looking across her after house toward the Luther Little (and the ladder that gave him access). They’d been here eight years, Hesper’s masts had just been removed, and both vessels had weathered badly. They kept on weathering for another 58 years until their carcasses were cleared away in 1998.

These four-masters were brought to life only a year apart during the First World War from Somerset , Massachusetts, shipyards, the Luther Little from Read Brosin 1917, and Hesper from Crowninshield’s in 1918.

An early death left Frank Winters’s dream—of his auction-acquired schooners carrying coal to his Wiscasset railroad wharf—unfulfilled.